Reliability of Solid-State Drives Based on NAND Flash Memory

This paper reviews the reliability of solid-state drives (SSDs) based on NAND Flash memory from the perspectives of failure mechanisms, design mitigations, qualification methods, and field failure rates. NAND reliability is dominated by gradual memory-cell degradation in late life and defects such a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the IEEE 2017-09, Vol.105 (9), p.1725-1750
Main Authors: Mielke, Neal R., Frickey, Robert E., Kalastirsky, Ivan, Quan, Minyan, Ustinov, Dmitry, Vasudevan, Venkatesh J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Confidence
Data retention
Data storage
Design defects
Disk drives
Drives
endurance
Error analysis
Failure
Failure mechanisms
Failure rates
Firmware
Flash memories
Flash memory (computers)
Integrated circuits
JEDEC
NAND flash memory
Qualifications
Radiation effects
reliability
Reliability analysis
Reliability engineering
Soft errors
Solid state devices
Solid-state circuits
solid-state drives (SSDs)
Statistical tests
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Summary:This paper reviews the reliability of solid-state drives (SSDs) based on NAND Flash memory from the perspectives of failure mechanisms, design mitigations, qualification methods, and field failure rates. NAND reliability is dominated by gradual memory-cell degradation in late life and defects such as interconnect shorts earlier in life. Design mitigations exist for these mechanisms. Qualification methods standardized in JEDEC JESD218 are designed to evaluate the mechanisms and mitigations, over a full drive lifetime, in the laboratory. Full-lifetime qualification provides confidence in the long-term reliability of SSDs that cannot be achieved by the early-life qualifications performed on hard disk drives. If NAND mechanisms are sufficiently suppressed, field reliability will be dominated by non-NAND mechanisms such as firmware bugs, power-loss events, radiation-induced soft errors, and failures in non-NAND components. A wide range of design validation and qualification tests are necessary to evaluate these non-NAND mechanisms. Published field reliability statistics indicate that SSDs are more reliable on average than HDDs, but they are not immune to failure, and there is wide variation among models. The NAND and non-NAND mechanisms are illustrated through new case studies of SSD internal qualification and field reliability data.
ISSN:0018-9219
1558-2256
DOI:10.1109/JPROC.2017.2725738